Jewish WWII pilot Si Spiegel pioneered the modern artificial Christmas tree
Si Spiegal died this past January at the age of 99
Si Spiegel did not invent the artificial Christmas tree, but he is responsible for the way it stands beneath the ornaments and tinsel in so many homes today.
"He had people studying trees and the idea of why can't an artificial tree look like a real tree. [That's] a real-size Spiegel achievement," Spiegel's friend, journalist and author Laurie Gwen Shapiro told As It Happens host Nil Köksal.
Spiegel died last January at the age of 99.
In 2021, Shapiro wrote about Si Spiegel's dual legacy for the New York Times after years of meeting with him over coffee or lunch, where they became fast friends. In the article, she described how Spiegel grew up in a Jewish family in Greenwich Village, N.Y., where his father ran a laundry.
When he was 17 years old, he signed up to be a pilot and fight the Nazis in the Second World War. Spiegel flew dozens of missions on his B-17 bomber aircraft, one of the most dangerous tasks for an American soldier, and at one point was declared missing in action. Spiegel found his way back, and he returned to the United States as a first lieutenant at the age of 21.
He was a highly-decorated pilot and one of the youngest veterans of the Second World War, but Shapiro said Spiegel could not advance as a pilot due to antisemitism in the U.S. military.
So he went back to work at a local machine shop, and ended up in a factory that made small, colourful brushes for shop windows. That's when "something clicked," Shapiro said, and Spiegel got the idea to give the artificial Christmas tree a complete makeover.
Spiegel made fake trees with natural-looking needles and branches that could adjust to resemble birch or fir, as well as "easily detachable limb groupings for quick setup."
He established the Hudson Valley Tree Company and mass-produced 80,000 artificial Christmas trees per year. He went on to sell the company in 1992 for $12 million US — an especially notable achievement given he'd grown up in poverty, said Shapiro.
"He had three marriages, but his love of his life was his second wife, Motoko Akita, and he had three kids. And he was very, very proud of his family and his grandchildren. But what he really wanted to talk to me about was the war."
Trading in his wrench for wings
Spiegel never went to college, said Shapiro, but as a Jewish man, he wanted to contribute to the fight against the extermination of Jewish people during the Second World War. He was just 18 years old when he joined the army as a mechanic in 1942.
But Spiegel felt he wasn't doing enough.
"What he told me was, how was he going to fight Hitler with a wrench?" said Shapiro.
He was stationed at Roosevelt Field on Long Island, N.Y., when he got into a conversation with a pilot while fixing a plane, said Shapiro.
"That pilot told Spiegel to 'go about two miles to Mitchell Field and see if they'll take you.'"
While it was uncommon for a Jewish person to become a pilot, going to this lesser known facility to sign up instead of the more popular Times Square worked in Spiegel's favour.
"He was already in uniform because he was a mechanic, and there were only two people that showed up that day and the other one had bad eyesight and [Spiegel] had perfect vision."
Spiegel became an aviation cadet and travelled across the states to learn Morse code, navigation and primary training. He learned barrel rolls and loops. Then, he received his wings.
Missing in action
Spiegel flew 36 missions as a B-17 bomber pilot — but his 33rd mission was one of the most memorable.
It began when the pilots and their crews were told they were going to bomb Berlin headquarters, said Shapiro. But Spiegel had a malfunction in one engine, then lost his second engine to flak. With ammunition hitting the plane and gas leaking, he couldn't keep up with the formation. Only halfway to their destination, he didn't have enough gas in the tank.
"He asked his navigator, Ray Patoolski, to get them to Poland, where there had been Russian troops who had already passed Warsaw. And he thought that maybe they would be safe if they got past Russian lines and they landed on basically this Polish field. And it was quite a scene," Shapiro said.
Soon, they found out that another American crew flying a B-17 had landed in the exact same spot at the same time.
Spiegel and the other pilot, George Ruckman, thought they were going to get out within a couple of days, but no one knew where they were.
"The Russian officers weren't telling anyone," Shapiro said. "They saw a value in having these Americans there."
The Americans were not their prisoners, but they were not allowed to leave until Moscow approved. Plus, they had no means to leave either.
So the two pilots cracked a plan, and they combined the parts on their planes without anyone noticing, to create a "Frankenstein vehicle of aircraft."
"One pilot would go out drinking with the Russian officers watching them while the other crew was working on it. And then the other team would go out drinking and eventually they were doing these fixes and they put together this plane," Shapiro said.
After several months, the two B-17 bomber crews escaped Poland on St. Patrick's Day in 1945. They were 19 men total, on a plane that usually held 10 to 13 people. After eight hours in flight, they landed at an allied base in Foggia, Italy.
"People were shocked…. They were supposed to be dead,'" Shapiro said.
When Spiegel returned to New York, he was a war hero, but as a Jewish man, he was not allowed to fly commercially. Rockman, the other pilot, got promoted, while Spiegel wasn't even allowed in the famous Wings Club.
His granddaughter Maya Ono told The New York Times that he was among the last surviving American B-17 pilots of the Second World War.
Earlier this year, when Spiegel died, Shapiro said she realized that her friend's dual legacy would not have been as well remembered if she hadn't published his story a few years earlier.
"There was a very large obituary that ran in The New York Times. And, of course, I felt this wonderful pride knowing that he probably wouldn't have gotten an obituary if I hadn't written that article," she said.
"And so the legacy really lives on."
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Interview produced by Devin Nguyen